"But the programme today has a drawback for political junkies and that is its general view of the world. If you took all the trendy liberalism that makes up the BBC and bubbled it over the Bunsen burner until you were left with the purest residue, the irreducible core of metropolitan Left-wingery — well, that’s Newsnight.It would be interesting to hear the BBC's response to this charge.
It regards Right-wing politicians as some alien species, necessary (just) to the political process but viewed with either curiosity or contempt, depending on their demeanour. I’m sure this is not deliberate, that people aren’t consciously trying to present politics from a Left-wing standpoint.It happens because that’s the programme’s mindset.
Take last year’s stunt by the programme to set up a panel to identify candidates for public spending cuts. The four members were Greg Dyke (a former Labour donor); Deborah Mattinson (Gordon Brown’s pollster); Lord Jones of Birmingham (a former Labour minister), and Matthew Taylor (a former adviser to Tony Blair). Didn’t it strike anyone, anyone at all, that this looked just a little rum? Probably not.
This is never going to change, of course. As long as the BBC is a publicly-funded state broadcasting organisation, its leading current affairs programme is going to take a Leftist view of things. It’s the way of the world, pointless complaining about it. But it’s still a shame. Imagine how good it could be if it broke out of its comfort zone occasionally. "
Sunday 24 January 2010
"As long as the BBC is a publicly-funded state broadcasting organisation, its leading current affairs programme is going to take a Leftist view..."
David Hughes' piece in The Telegraph about the 30th anniversary of Newsnight contained an interesting section:
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3 comments:
Personally, if I were the Tory leader, I'd totally ignore the BBC, instruct all my MPs and PPCs not to appear on it, and start offering exclusive interviews to one of the less biased channels. It could embarrass the BBC, as the have a duty to be impartial, but the Tories have no obligation to assist them. If the Tories withdrew from Party Political broadcasts on the BBC, I wonder if the rest would have to be withdrawn?
I think English Pensioner goes too far. Much more fun would be to throw all this Diversity Training back in the faces of the "Liberal Left" with Political Diversity Awareness training courses and rooting out "Institutional Bias".
Personally, if I were Tory leader I would wait until elected as Prime Minister, and then annouce the following day that the TV Licence tax was abolished, with immediate effect. That would lead to a surge in popularity, and also to a saving in public expenditure, as the whole coercive apparatus of TV Licence collection would be eliminated.
As for the BBC, it could be left to sink or swim, or be broken up and sold. We would then find out how many people would pay their own money for an endless diet of leftist propaganda, global warming scaremongering, and multi-culti drivel.
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